Aldo Leopold (1887-1948)

I first read about Aldo Leopold in the 'National Geographic' book my dad purchased.........When I was a school kid.....

The page started with the title "A Durable Scale Of Values"

The quote that caught my very first attention as I browsed through the following pages as follows....

"Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question whether a still higher “standard of living“ is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free."

Boyd Gibbons,"Aldo Leopold: A Durable Scale of Values,” National Geographic, vol. 160, no. 5 (November 1981):

"Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left…you cannot love game and hate predators…The land is one organism".

"There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace. To avoid the first danger, one should plant a garden, preferably where there is no grocer to confuse the issue. To avoid the second, he should lay a split of good oak on the andirons, preferably where there is no furnace, and let it warm his shins while a February blizzard tosses the trees outside. If one has cut, split, hauled, and piled his own good oak, and let his mind work the while, he will remember much about where the heat comes from, and with a wealth of detail denied to those who spend the week end in town astride a radiator".

"There are woods that are plain to look at, but not to look into…The taste for country displays the same diversity in aesthetic competence among individuals as the taste for opera, or oils".

"Getting up too early is a vice habitual in horned owls, stars, geese, and freight trains. Some hunters acquire it from geese, and some coffee pots from hunters. It is strange that of all the multitudes of creatures who must rise in the morning at some time, only these few should have discovered the most pleasant and least useful time for doing it".

One hundred and twenty acres, according to the County Clerk, is the extent of my worldly domain. But the County Clerk is a sleepy fellow…at daybreak I am the sole owner of all the acres I can walk over. It is not only the boundaries that disappear, but also the thought of being bounded.

Aldo Leopold Wilderness

"Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question whether a still higher “standard of living” is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free".

Entrance to the Aldo Leopold Commemorative Trail

We shall never achieve harmony with land, any more than we shall achieve justice or liberty for people. In these higher aspirations the important thing is not to achieve, but to strive…

Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac(New York: Oxford University Press, 1968)

"If the quotes itself were gold I bet his whole book is Priceless"